Cyclepath Adventure Racing

Hani raced with Team Gaelforce this past weekend at the Gold Rush 24hr race while a contingent of Team Cyclepath provided support crew services. The route took Gaelforce through Stanislaus National Forest where they paddled fiercely, conquered a nasty uphill bike section, and even got some time playing around with the ropes. His race report is featured below.

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Sorry for the bad English ahead of time. I am too tired to spell check and edit

Here are the pictures if you want to skip the details

hani.shutterfly.com

Section 1 - a trek to get 2 CPs. In the pre-race talk, it was suggested that slower teams should consider skipping CP1. Since we were not slow, we went for it. It was a steeeeeeep climb all the way to peak. Not sure how steep, but there was no trail. Just old fashioned point A to point b climb. CP 2 was back down to the lake. At this point, the team was feeling strong. We were even running at points.

Section 2 - Kayak/Trek to get 2 CPs. We kayaked for about 45 minutes to get to the other side of the lake. On foot to get 2 CPs. Navigation was excellent and we made up time on some teams

Section 3 - Kayak - about 2 hours. Caught a team on the way and saw many teams in the transition. Our crew was ready. It was overwhelming. I never had that level of care in a race. It was amazing. Thank you again to the crew.

Section 3.5 - Get the bikes across the river to start biking. It was an interesting twist, but fun. We had to use an inflatable dingy to get the bikes across the river and get our equipment over too.

Section 4 - Bike? We had bikes, but we did not get to use them much. Lots of hike a bike along the river. It sucked!!! rocks, sand and bushes. Oh, well, this is adventure racing. We finally got a chance to ride the bikes until the trail came to the river. We had to walk through. No real good place to stay dry. Back on the bike for a short time.

Section 5 - Rappel = Yes, but no one said anything about ascending. They told us at the pre-race that we will be using an ascender as a “safety” device when we hike up a steep section of the race. So, we start with a 10 fool wall (90 degree section). This was a surprise. All of us managed to get us this section, but we struggled. At the top, we got on the rappel rope and got down.

Section 6 - Trekking/Canyoneering. 10 hours. It was about 5 and it was starting to get dark. Not good. The team chemistry was really good. so we started. They warned us that we would lose the trail. They were right and then the challenge of the river, the canyon, the darkness, and being tired. Everyone contributed. Everyone stayed positive. The situation certainly challenged us staying positive

Section 7 - Short coursed - Biking. It is about 4am now. It is really cold. Freezing. And…we were reminded that we were in the Sierra foothills. Lots of up and down. It seemed like it was more up than down.

Section 8 - The finish line.

A lot happened in the race. It was funny, sad, and scary. I was proud of the team. We stayed together, not just physically, but emotionally. We pushed each other and we also knew when it was time to stop.

All team members were at the finish line still on their feet. We did not take first place, but I am proud that we started the race with 4 people and all 4 people were at the finish line. And…we are better friends now.

THIS WAS THE HARDEST RACE I HAVE EVER DONE!!

-Hani

A former Master’s World Record holder in the Ironman Triathlon, as well as a World Record Holder in the Iditashoe 100Mile Snowshoe Race, Sally has spent the last 30+ years as a professional athlete. She has competed in some of the hardest races on the planet, including numerous multiday adventure races and the Western States 100Mile Run (which she won).

From the time she ran the 1984 Olympic Marathon Trials using her heart rate monitor, Sally has been at the forefront of a revolution in fitness training. Never one to trust in guesswork, Sally combined her Master’s degree in exercise physiology with her experience as a professional athlete and created the Heart Zones Training System.

A founder of the sport of triathlon (and a Triathlon Hall of Fame inductee), most of Sally’s recent races have been performed in her role as the National Spokeswoman for the Danskin Triathlon Series. Sally has finished every Danskin Triathlon (as of 2005, sixteen years worth) dead last, as the “Final Finisher,” inspiring more than 100,000 other women to make it across the finish line in front of her. The year 2004 marked her 100th lastplace Danskin finish in Denver, Colorado on July the 17th.

A prolific author of more than 20 books and 300 articles on fitness and sports, a motivational keynote speaker, and (with a second Master’s degree in Business Administration) an entrepreneur, Sally is committed to helping others improve their health, fitness, and finish by listening to their hearts.

CyclePath Pleasanton invites you to meet…

Sally Edwards
Cyclist, Ironman triathlete, Author

at our

Opening Day
November 4th, 10 am –12 pm

CyclePath Pleasanton
337B Main Street
(rear of BofA building)
Pleasanton, CA. 94566
(925) 485 3218
web: http://www.cyclepath.com 

Cyclepath has been serving the bay area for over 30 years starting in Hayward and most recently our San Mateo store. We are committed to superior service with the broadest of product choices including Specialized, Trek, Lemond, LOOK, Cannondale, Orbea, Calfee, Fisher, Raleigh, and Scott Bicycles. Our new opening in downtown Pleasanton on Main St. sharing the Bank of America building now provides local residents with a premium choice in cycling. Some of our offerings include full bicycle fittings, shop rides, demo rides, and Indoor/Outdoor Group Cycling training with Inspire Fitness.

We woke up early on Sunday and drove down to Joe Grant’s County Park for the Bay Area Orienteering Club’s Rogaine (Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance) meet, “for those unfamiliar with this type of event, teams of 2 or more participants are launched in a mass start to find orienteering markers distributed over a wide area. The markers are assigned point values, with highest values assigned to those markers that are hardest to reach. Each team’s goal is to visit whatever markers they can reach within the time allotted, in whatever order they like, to maximize their point total. If they return to the finish (typically the same as the start) after the time limit expires, they will lose points for each minute of overtime.”

Cyn and I were looking at this as a training event and not a race. We’ve been fortunate to travel/race with; Randy Franklin, Brandon Nugent (who was in attendance with team mate Chuck Fancher) and John Turner through the recent AR season and it was time to put some of the navigation skills learned during these lessons to practical application. Competitors were allowed to open their maps eight minutes prior to the start in order to plot various courses. We planned our course around what we considered a doable route, not one designed to accumulate points. Our goals were to learn as we go, find as many control points as possible in the allotted seven hours and interpet map to land features as much as possible even if that meant giving up points. Most of all have fun!

As it turns out we found every CP we chose to acquire, including two clean cross country attempts, with only two hick ups during the entire event. Each of the hick ups revolved around seeing other teams in the vicinity and making faulty assumptions. We had opportunity to do some compass navigation, map interpretation and travel over poison oak infested land. With the season being fall the oak was easily identifiable and thus avoidable, unless you happen to be me; then the evil stuff reaches out and grabs you! The local Adventure Race community represented well. Results can be accessed through the following link.
http://baoc.org/wiki/Results/2006/Joe_Grant_Rogaine

This past Saturday, Cyn and I competed in the Wavechaser paddle series. The race was staged out of the Half Moon Bay Yacht Club and was the first of their winter series. Racers had a choice of three races; the novice course was confined to the inside the harbor, the short course was estimated to be slightly less than 6 miles with the majority of it reaching out into the ocean and the long course (experts only) took place off shore.

Cyn and I opted for the short course. We were the only traditional kayak in attendance, which had us feeling a bit like outsiders. Most of the boats racing were outrigger canoes (ORC) with some surf skis spattered amongst them. All were high tech with carbon and Kevlar composites. We were way out of our league and didn’t think our Seda fiberglass tandem would match up well.

The race started with our sterns near the shoreline. Cyn and hung back (in a second row) thinking our hull speed would be slower. We didn’t want to get in the way of the faster boats. 53 boats were at the starting line. Within the first 10 strokes of the gun going off a guy in an ORC decided to go swimming (ahh, memories of last year’s futura). Much to our surprise, our hull speed held up well with the ORC. We dropped/lost our line/placement several times because we were being bumped by some ORC.

We took the right hand turn out of the harbor to open sea and raced to the first green (channel marker) buoy about ¾ of a mile away. The swells were higher than what we are used to paddling in the SF bay, but not too bad. A wind was blowing towards the Northwest off the shoreline, which made for some interesting seas. The white caps were blowing opposite the swells.

We found ourselves in the front half of the pack as we rounded the buoy. Everything shifted for us, instead of just training we realized we could do fairly well and the competitive juices kicked in. We headed to a buoy near the shore (about a 2-mile stretch) and passed some more teams prior to rounding and heading back to the green buoy. We held our position on this leg and then passed another team on the way into the harbor.

The final half mile was interesting because we needed to paddle like crazy to avoid being caught by two boats that were pushing hard! We held them off and finished finished 16^th out of 53 overall. We were the third mixed couple to cross and first within our division (only us).

The event offered up a great barbeque and social after the race. We partook of the festivities prior to fighting the pumpkin festival traffic heading home. It was all good this day.

 Results can be viewed here:  http://www.wavechaser.com/results/2007/HMB_WC_1_SHORT_102106.pdf.pdf

On Saturday I hooked up Thomas Bastis to compete in the West Coast’s largest, most popular, and (according to race promoters) definitely most fun sea kayaking event of the year! Widely considered the “Bay To Breakers” of sea kayaking; the annual Sea Trek Regatta and Paddle-a-thon is a chance for the Bay Area paddling community to share in a fun and challenging day of paddling on San Francisco Bay and raise money for Environmental Traveling Companions’ (ETC) accessible outdoor adventure programs. All event proceeds went to support Environmental Traveling Companions (ETC), a Bay Area nonprofit organization providing accessible outdoor adventures for people with disabilities and inner-city youth.We ran into Brian and Guy of the Dirty Avocados who were each racing solo. Cyn was in attendance (arm still healing) taking pictures and hauling our heavy packs around (I mean training.)

The start was about a quarter mile wide and three courses were established as follows:

· An out and back to Richardson’s Bay
· Loop around Angel Island
· Loop around Alcatraz/Angel Island

The start had the most kayaks I’ve ever seen in one place, from sleek and fast surf skis to the slow ponderous cobra tandems. I’m guessing nearly a hundred kayaks were on the water. Thomas and I were racing in a traditional tandem and chose the Alcatraz route as the torture de jour.

Being new to this sport we were uncertain as to the best starting position for our course. We compromised and started in the middle, picking a line that would allow us to use the ebb tide as a ferry. Once the race gun went off, it didn’t take long to realize most of the kayaks doing our course were well to the Sausalito side of us. I’m not certain they had the best line but they were able to draft each other. About half way to Alcatraz we spotted our competition. A team that hailed from Puerto Rico was in a Kevlar Seda Tango, we were in the faithful flying Platypus (Necky Nootka). They beat us to the island by about 100 meters. We were determined to make this a race and dug in as hard as we were able. We caught them by the time we rounded the island and started drafting.

In my mind I thought the race was won. We could save energy by staying in their slip stream and then out sprint them at the finish when they faded. The problem was they didn’t cooperate. On the back side of Angel Island they pushed and we couldn’t answer. We lost their slip stream and slowly faded over the remainder of the course until we were a minute behind at the finish.

We completed the course in less than 2 hours, and held up really well against these single sport specialists. We tried to convert some of the racers to the sport of AR, but there was little interest within this sub-culture.

It was a great day on the water.

Team Cyclepath battled rain, wind, mud in Moab, Utah to complete the AdventureXtream expedition. It was beautiful out there and the ethereal experience of desert mesas, snow-capped mountains, and impromptu waterfalls is one we will never forget. The course was shortened for all racers several times due to the weather and safety issues - the rain was washing out trails/roads and letting loose rockslides throughout the course. Our team went 42 hours total for a completion time at 1pm on Saturday. As of now we placed 21 out of 32 teams but that placement may change as time penalties (for us and other teams) are taken into account. (Edit: Per Karl’s research - Our final placement appears to have us ranked 14 out of 23 teams in division and we were the 17th team to finish out of the 34 total teams that competed in the race.)
A big shoutout to those who tracked us over at CheckpointTracker.com. Thanks for the support and thank you for the wonderful and kinds words that you sent us. We were able to view these during the race and it definitely helped to move us forward! We apologize we weren’t able send audio updates to this website - hopefully we will have this working for the next big race.

Also, a big thank you to Cyclepath.com and ARNavSupplies.com, our sponsors who support our ability to do all this fun, tough, and amazing racing.

Thanks again! Much love from Team Cyclepath!

The Cyclepath team and crew is converging on Moab, Utah site of the Adventure Xtream Expedition race.  Today we are organizing gear and logistics and tomorrow is the start of the race. Hopefully everything goes smoothly and the race is safe, tough, and fun for all participants. 

 We will be posting updates as we can but for now we’d like to go ahead and thank our awesome support crew Pat Franklin for helping us out and keeping us warm and fed throughout the race.  We’d also like to thank our sponsors Cyclepath.com  and ARNavSupplies.com for providing gear and supporting the race for us.

Also, feel free to track us over at CheckpointTracker.com

See you out there!